When women are first diagnosed with breast cancer, they experience a wide range of feelings such as sadness, helplessness, anxiety and fear. It is important to remember these feelings are normal. Many women also have a hard time talking with their doctor. They often feel intimidated, concerned they are taking up too much time, worried about asking a "stupid" question or are fearful of the answers.

WHAT IS CANCER?

Cancer is a general term for more than 100 diseases. All these are characterised by some
central similarities which can be used to define cancer.

* Cancer is a neoplasm (tumour) which is also known as a new growth
* Cancer results from uncontrolled cell growth
* This growth is caused by a mutation within the genes of the cell
* This genetic mutation can be caused by exposure to carcinogens (these are
substances which increase the risk of cancer in humans or animals)
* Once the mutation has started the tumour will continue to grow even if the
carcinogen is removed

Age

Age The risk of getting breast cancer increases with age. A woman who lives to age 90 has a lifetime risk of about 14.3%, or one in seven. The probability of breast cancer rises with age, but breast cancer tends to be more aggressive when it occurs in younger people. One type of breast cancer that is especially aggressive and that occurs disproportionately in younger people is inflammatory breast cancer. It is initially staged as Stage IIIb or Stage IV. It also is unique because it often does not present with a lump, so it is often undetected by mammography or ultrasound. It presents with the signs and symptoms of a breast infection like mastitis, and the treatment is usually a combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.

Diet

Dietary influences have been proposed and examined, and recent research suggests that low-fat diets may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer as well as the recurrence of breast cancer. Another study showed no contribution of dietary fat intake on the incidence of breast cancer in over 300,000 women. A randomized controlled study of the consequences of a low-fat diet, the Women's Health Initiative, failed to show a statistically significant reduction in breast cancer incidence in the group assigned to a low-fat diet, although the authors did find evidence of a benefit in the subgoup of women who followed the low-fat diet in a strict manner. Another randomized trial, the Nurses' Health Study II, found increased breast cancer incidence in premenopausal women only, with higher intake of animal fat, but not vegetable fat. Taken as a whole, these results point to a possible association between dietary fat intake and breast cancer incidence, though these interactions are hard to measure in large groups of women. A significant environmental effect is likely responsible for the different rates of breast cancer incidence between countries with different dietary customs. Researchers have long measured that breast cancer rates in an immigrant population soon come to resemble the rates of the host country after a few generations. The reason for this is speculated to be immigrant uptake of the host country diet. The prototypical example of this phenomenon is the changing rate of breast cancer after the arrival of Japanese immigrants to America.